Lodge: Angel of Death; Angel of Ahlem

The soldier lounges on a wood and canvas deck chair, his eyes closed and a smile on his face. He knows his picture is being taken.

Richard K. Lodge

The soldier lounges on a wood and canvas deck chair, his eyes closed and a smile on his face. He knows his picture is being taken.

He could be anyone's father or grandfather in just another sepia snapshot from World War II. But this man sports the uniform of the German SS and he lounges with a row of equally relaxed young female members of the SS women's auxiliary.

The scallop-edged photo is among 116 images in an album found by a U.S. Army intelligence officer in an abandoned apartment in Frankfurt in 1946 while he was investigating Nazi war crimes.

A year ago the officer called Rebecca Erbelding, an archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and mailed her the photos, pasted on both sides of 16 cardboard album pages.

The photos are remarkable for their rarity, since no photos have turned up from WWII that show Auschwitz death camp soldiers in their leisure hours. And the photos are remarkable for how unremarkable the events are, captured on the 1 1/2- by- 3-inch prints.

Among the photographs now on the Holocaust Memorial Museum's Web site are scenes of German soldiers - including notorious Dr. Josef Mengele, known as the "Angel of Death" for the human experiments he did at the camp - relaxing, singing, mugging for the camera, showing off a favorite dog and even lighting a Christmas tree.

These photos could be just another odd war trophy, the kind of minor plunder soldiers and sailors have carried home from the battlefield for centuries.

But these images are haunting for being so ordinary. Whoever took them, probably with one of the ubiquitous Leicas that were the hallmark of German optics, carefully wrote on each photo who was in it and, in many cases, the date the photo was taken and what the scene showed.

Erbelding, who has worked at the museum for five years, said on Friday that only 320 photos taken at Auschwitz were known to exist before this latest album turned up.

When the cardboard pages with their attached photos arrived at the museum, Erbelding said she and other researchers set to work studying the images to determine who was in them and if, indeed, they were taken at Auschwitz.

"After we found Mengele (in several of the photos) we started doing research to figure out who the other people were. There are some pretty infamous people in there. From there, we were able to use the photos to figure out where and when they were taken," she said.

The originals are slightly smaller than a credit card, so researchers at the museum made 8-by-10 enlargements for closer study. The larger images revealed details in the backgrounds of some photos, fragments of signs or more easily verified insignia, for example.

Photos of Mengele are very rare. Mengele disappeared after the war and died by accidental drowning in Brazil in 1979, but before his death he became famous as one of the more prominent Nazis never brought to justice.

"There were maybe 20 photographs of him, before these came into my hands," Erbelding said, "and none of the photos I can find of him were taken at Auschwitz," except those in this album.

She said it also was important to verify the photos were taken at Auschwitz and that Karl Hocker, who was adjutant to the camp commandant and shown in many of the photos, owned the album.

"Hocker was the most difficult one because it was so important we identify him. That's the way you trace the provenance of the album - you want to know who owned it, who created it and what their role at the camp was."

Hocker appears in many of the photos and the captions - one that reads "with the commandant" for example, showing Hocker with a man identified through other means as the commandant of Auschwitz at the time - pointed to Hocker as owner of the album.

"Now we're operating at 99.999 percent certainty that it was his," Erbelding said.

After some of the photographs were published with a story in the New York Times recently, visits to the Holocaust Memorial Museum's Web site over a three-day period jumped from a typical 200,000 to 700,000.

Coverage of the photos also appeared in the German magazine Bild and other publications in that country.

"The more publicity (the album) gets in Germany, we're hoping someone will either come forward to confirm information or come forward identifying more people" in the photographs, Erbelding said. "We're hoping we can get help" to add to what already has been learned about these rare images.

Did she ever doubt the photos were real?

No, said Erbelding, whose career is research.

"The photography is World War II era and I've seen a lot of it. You can't escape the identifications. It's clearly the people they are - the exact ranks, they're in the right place for the dates on the photos. It never crossed my mind" the album could be a fake.

Of the 320 photos that existed before the Frankfurt find, about 200 of those were from an album showing the arrival and sorting of Hungarian prisoners at the camp. The only other series of photos were official images taken of a tour by German military officers in 1942.

This latest album "is the first one where people are simply relaxing," she said.

Erbelding said she hopes people reading about these new photos "will remember and realize we are still learning and still collecting (the history of the war and the Holocaust). I hope they will think about what they have. They may have letters their fathers or grandfathers sent home about the liberation of the camp. They may have family heirlooms and not know what to do with those things.

"In some cases it may be more useful for research to have these things at a museum," she said.

Many of the photos were taken at a recreation lodge near the death camp, which means the SS commanders and the visiting German officers captured on film were making small talk, singing to the strains of an accordionist and relaxing on the porch within spitting distance of the ovens.

Did they think about the horrors their underlings were committing nearby? Did smoke from the furnaces where bodies of those killed in the gas chambers were burned, drift overhead when the wind shifted? Could Karl Hocker hear cries of fear or grief coming from beyond the death camp barbed wire? Did Josef Mengele's thoughts shift from small talk to his grim business of murder when he heard the grinding and shrieking of steel boxcar wheels as the next load of Hungarian Jews or Roma arrived?

The photos won't answer those questions. They only show what was there and, in the careful handwritten captions, give hints of why each photo was taken.

* * *

Just a week after the German SS photos were featured on the front of the New York Times Arts section, National Public Radio told the story about another set of photos taken in one of the camps. In one of the continuing series about World War II, Susan Stamberg recounted how Vernon Tott quit school and enlisted in the Army during WWII.

After fighting in the Battle of the Bulge, Tott's 84th Infantry Division marched toward Hanover, Germany, in April 1945.

The division was passing next to a fenced area when one of the soldiers brought out a baseball.

Ben Sieradzki, who had survived the starvation and brutality of the Ahlem slave labor camp, was among the camp's prisoners who watched the soldiers walking past.

"There was a road. And we saw soldiers. One of them brought out a baseball," and that was when Sieradzki and the others realized these were Americans.

"We started screaming, 'come up here, come on up here,' and some of (the American soldiers) were just bewildered," Sieradzki told NPR's Stamberg. "They didn't know it was a concentration camp."

Vernon Tott used his pocket camera to take photographs of what the Americans found: Piles of bodies; the spindle-thin frames of the living prisoners; survivors who were so sick and starved that they couldn't climb out of their bunks; and other prisoners who had died in their beds and were stripped of their clothing by fellow prisoners, desperate for warmth.

The recollections of Tott, who died in 2005, were quoted from a reunion of his 84th Infantry Division.

"We were witnessing hell on earth. Piles of dead bodies. Men in ragged clothing that were just skin and bones."

After the war, Stamberg reported, Tott put his photos in a shoebox on a shelf in his home in Sioux City. For half a century Tott put the war behind him until he was reading his Army newsletter in 1995 and found a request from Ben Sieradzki, seeking information from anyone who took photos of him and other prisoners when the GIs liberated Ahlem.

Tott called him up.

"'My name is Vernon Tott and I think you're looking for me,"' Sieradzki recalled, in his interview with NPR. "And I said, 'Are you still a tall blonde fellow?' And he said, 'Not any longer."'

In short order, Tott sent photos to Sieradzki, who found one that showed him, as a gaunt 18-year-old, standing amid a few other living prisoners, surrounded by the bodies of the dead.

Tott continued his search for other Ahlem survivors and found nearly 30 of them, including 16 captured in his photos of the camp. In 2001, he traveled to Hanover, Germany, with three of Ahlem survivors to dedicate a memorial to those who died there.

Stamberg reported that, in 2003, Tott's name was inscribed on a wall of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Earlier this year, the premiere of "Angel of Ahlem," a documentary about Vernon Tott, was shown in his hometown of Sioux City.

In May, "Angel of Ahlem" was screened in New York City at Lincoln Center.

"Nearly a dozen survivors were there," Stamberg reported, "reunited because of Tott, his pocket camera and his unwavering determination."

* * *

Two sets of photos, both stuck away for a while, but now giving us all a glimpse of a terrible time more than 60 years ago.

One set shows some of the henchmen of Auschwitz - including the Angel of Death - enjoying themselves, singing, relaxing and celebrating. The other photos - taken by the Angel of Ahlem - show the remnants of their work at another camp, through the blank stares from the living skeletons, including Ben Sieradzki and his fellow survivors.

In both cases these are precious snapshots that can tell us about the darkest corners of the human imagination and the brightest light that shines from the human spirit.

Richard Lodge is editor of The MetroWest (Mass.) Daily News. His e-mail is rlodge@cnc.com

To see the photographs from the Auschwitz album, go to www.ushmm.org. To see Vernon Tott's photographs, go to http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14661020